There is no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel. Too often, we have these grand promises that are never backed up— I would argue that carbon capture and storage is another one. But if the Government are to press ahead with so-called sustainable aviation fuel, the very least we should expect is full transparency about what is being produced, where it is coming from and what the real impacts are

My speech to the House last night: Reporting on UK sustainable fuel production would give Parliament the ability to see whether this industry is genuinely delivering any climate benefits or whether we are simply shifting emissions, land pressures and environmental harms elsewhere.

As one expert put it

“We’re not about to start eating more chips, so we will have to start importing more waste oil”.

What if rising European demand for so-called waste oil is being met with virgin palm oil fraudulently passed off as waste? If that is happening—studies suggest it is—then any emissions savings vanish, replaced by deforestation for palm-oil plantations. Plus, most of our waste cooking oil is currently used in road transport fuels, so diverting it into aviation simply shifts emissions elsewhere and nothing actually shrinks.

Parliament should not be expected to take the Government’s optimism on trust. We need to see what is really happening, and Amendment 15 would provide at least a little transparency, accountability and a dose of realism—three things that are too often missing from aviation policy. If the Government believe that sustainable aviation fuel will play a meaningful role in decarbonising aviation, they should have no hesitation in reporting openly and regularly on its progress.

My Amendment 19A asks the Secretary of State to do something that should already be at the heart of a Bill such as this: to acknowledge that what we do here—what we incentivise, what we subsidise and what we label as sustainable—has real consequences for land, forests and communities here and far beyond our shores. Sustainability does not stop at the white cliffs of Dover. Protecting land over here while outsourcing environmental destruction over there is not sustainability; it is hypocrisy.

Supporting crop-based aviation fuels risks taking land away from food and from nature. It risks fuelling deforestation, especially in the global South, where communities are already living with the impacts of land grabs and ecological collapse. Yet this Bill encourages exactly that. We are using or talking about land as if it were an infinite resource, and it most definitely is not. Land is already under enormous pressure from farming, housing, biodiversity loss and climate breakdown. Turning that precious land over to growing crops for climate-destroying fuel makes absolutely no sense.

My amendment would require the Government to publish an assessment of how the revenue support mechanism for so-called sustainable aviation fuel is affecting land use internationally, including whether it is driving deforestation or other damaging land use change. Parliament deserves to know if we are simply shifting environmental harm on to other countries while congratulating ourselves on green progress.

Even if we overlook the land use impacts—and we should not—this Bill will not do anything to actually reduce air travel emissions. Sustainable aviation fuel, as described here, is at best a drop in the ocean—a rapidly rising ocean. A clever accounting trick will not cool the planet, nor will a marginal fuel switch deliver any sort of the emissions reductions we need. One analysis of sustainable fuels shows that carbon emission savings are almost entirely wiped out by the rising demand for air travel. As Professor Bill Rutherford of Imperial College said:

“The only way you can make aviation any more sustainable is to do less of it”.

Every hectare of land used to grow fuel crops risks locking us further into a system that protects the freedom of frequent flyers, rather than the future of the planet.

Debate available on Hansard here